As I learn more about the current global financial crisis and watch the crisis unfold and expand, I cannot help thinking that the crisis is a stark reminder of our increasingly digital existence. The digital society is here and I sense we may have been able to avoid this crisis if we had some of the important bits like global governance in place.

Perhaps if consumers had been more proactive in demanding full traceability of their liability from their financial service providers, then the story could have been different. I believe a consumer-centered design of financial services could have made consumers think twice before taking on loans that they were unable to service.

With the uptake of telephony and commercial air travel our society has gradually gone global over the last 35 years or so. The advanced nature of digitisation of our business transactions has made it very easy to use services that are very complex on the inside but deceptively simple on the outside. Borrowing and lending have grown wildly and without any sense of "ownership", global governance nor traceability. The speed and lack of transparency have made this network of transactions impossible to manage -- at least from the perspective of avoiding negligence and fraud. This has happended despite the fact that the banking sector has a robust institute like the BIS that sets guidelines for monetary stability. However, BIS cannot enforce these guidelines -- that is left to the individual nations.

It is inconceivable that our physical society would have exploited the innovations of the industrial age without the standardisation brought on by national and international bodies like ISO. But, our digital society is still young but moving fast -- and I believe we have not yet even conceived the standards that are needed to enforce security, traceability and interoperability -- some of the key requirements for collaboration without friction. We are barely at the early stages of standards for technical interoperability, something that allows software to collaborate. We have not yet scratched the surface of semantic and organisational interoperability -- that what is needed for organisations to operate and govern in a consistent manner.

Commerce in the world is advancing, and with an increasing amount of value-creation coming from the service economy. Not just finance, but healthcare and education sectors. Interoperability is then a neccessary condition for good and effective governance, but this governance must be global -- not in the sense of a hierarchical "one global head" sense, but in a consensus-driven format -- not unlike the way the Internet is managed.

Can our political and business leaders work on creating this platform without stifling innovation and entrepreneurship? I believe the time is right for government and commercial players to collaborate in creating a platform for innovation for the service economy. And for consumer-citizens to be aware of their role in making this platform useful.

PS! In some earlier posts I refered to this platform as the "societal digital infrastructure"

Demonstrators for the digital society

What started as an attempt to go beyond alumni reunions led to an interesting scenario of the digital society. On the 28th of November 2007 the alumni association of my high school in Mumbai, India handed over 100 cashless healthcards to teaching and non-teaching staff and ex-teachers (See newspaper coverage here - PS! Vikram and Gerry are the ones who have done all the heavy lifting).

There are a many digital societal elements to this "experiment"

• technology in the use of open source technology (Drupal) to collaborate, online payments (Paypal) to raise funds and support transparency in fundraising
• business models for the development of an insurance product for healthcare with a unique model for users, healthcare providers, insurers and financiers
• organisation design in redesigning the workings of the managing committee of the alumni association to be able to execute such a project, organisational flexibility for the school administration

However, this just the tip of the iceberg of challenges and opportunities -- an attempt to demonstrate that a grassroots driven idea to deliver something of value for many stakeholders can be done and hopefully raise the discussion of how citizens can participate in shaping its society.

For practical reasons, some elements have been out of scope -- elements that are critical for scaling up such ideas and sustaining them. This involves the creation of institutions and solutions that are of a foundational nature. Institutions that are industry-led but not driven by commercial interests, institutions that not only shape legislation but also have the authority to enforce it. The welfare models of the Nordics or Canada can be a source of inspiration but cannot be copy-pasted, they must be designed to suit the diversity, population size, existing infrastructure and maturity of existing institutions.

With the impending rush of baby-boomer retirement (eldrebølge) this is not just a welfare issue, there are some great business opportunities. The challenges are numerous everything from shaping new business models to establishing trust-institutions to harnessing the potential of personal health devices and body sensor network technology that will hit the market.

Now if the Healthcare, Insurance and Telecom providers could pool their resources to drive simple standards for interoperability ... then maybe the Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web could come to life in a very practical application that affects ordinary people. To my mind this form of catalyst activity is what government should focus on even more.

Photosynth from Microsoft Research (see here) takes Hypertexting, Semantics, Graphics and Social Networks to an amazing entertaining level ... with great potential for societies and businesses. See this video and judge for yourself.

Am not sure George Orwell would have approved (not that any one would have asked for approval) but this technology does bring a whole new meaning to "triangulation" -- distance learning, virtual tourism and telemedicine are some areas that can benefit from such technologies and affect the way societies work and live.

I sense a Facebook application (built on their application platform) is just round the corner :-)

Business Intelligence and Information Management meets Social Responsibility. See Maplight.org 

This mashup is a brilliant example of information technology driving transparency to create a world for the citizens and not only the big-buck businesses.  Combining internet technology with law has some ground shaking potential. So, now the "Right to Information Act" or Offentlighetsloven (or whatever each nation chooses to call their public information policy) can have real teeth. Watch this 6-min video) and judge the potential for yourself.

As a citizen, I wonder what happens to the old way politicians were elected to power? Do we really need to vote people in for 4 or 7 years at a stretch?

As a technologist, I see some really interesting ways to leverage topic-maps, semantic technologies and open-format content.

The "open-sourcedness" of this type of initiative is definitely the way to go. Need to push for information acess (social scientists) and information and semantic technology standards (technologists).
 
PS! This Wired article set me on this train of thought.